Sustainability? Have your say!

I finally had time to catch up with the Ugabytes online conference about telecentre sustainability. This multi-week event gathers African community technology champions to dig into one of the toughest questions facing telecentres.

After cruising through 10 days of discussion, I have to say this is one of the most impressive conversations on this issue I’ve seen. People have touched on:

The importance of social mission and community buy in as the first step towards sustainability … with this, people are driven to come up with inventive ways to keep a telecentre alive.

The diversity of approaches the people are actually employing to resource telecentres, including multi-stakholder partnerships, embedding in existing social orgs and volunteerism.

They very definition of the word ‘telecentre’ and the role telecentres play beyond simple access to computers and the Internet.

Truly, an amazing discussion that all of us can learn from … and contribute to. It’s on for a couple more weeks. You can join by going here and read the archives here.